Symptoms teenage suicide

Teens who spend less than two hours a day online don’t appear to face any elevated mental health risks, suggesting there might be a practical symptoms teenage suicide spot for device use short of total abstinence. A spike in the amount of time teenage girls in the United States spend online is a likely culprit behind the surge in rates of depression, suicide and contemplation of suicide, new research suggests. The finding stems from an analysis of fatal injury data collected between 1999 and 2015 by the U. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as two large ongoing surveys that have been tracking the thoughts of roughly a half-million American teens since 1991.

Around 2012, rates of depression, suicide attempts and suicide itself suddenly increased among teens, especially among girls,” said Jean Twenge. The increase occurred right around the same time smartphones became popular,” Twenge said. We found that teens who spent more time online were more likely to have at least one suicide-related outcome, such as depression, thinking about suicide, making a suicide plan, or having attempted suicide in the past,” she added. The researchers first reviewed CDC data concerning teen suicide, finding that the suicide rate for girls aged 13 to 18 had shot up by 65 percent between 2010 and 2015.

The investigators then reviewed teen responses to the Monitoring the Future survey and the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System survey. The polls revealed that the percentage of girls who said they’d experienced symptoms of severe depression had increased by 58 percent in that time frame. Hopelessness and suicidal contemplation had gone up by 12 percent. At the same time, nearly half of teens who indicated they spend five or more hours a day on a smartphone, laptop or tablet said they had contemplated, planned or attempted suicide at least once — compared with 28 percent of those who said they spend less than an hour a day on a device. Depression risk was also notably up among teens who spent excessive time on a device, the findings showed.

Results of the analysis were published in November in the journal Clinical Psychological Science. Boys are likely to be affected in the same way as girls, Twenge said, although she noted that boys tend to “spend less time on social media and more time on games, which might not affect mental health as much. Twenge also acknowledged the possibility “that instead of time online causing depression, depression causes more time online,” but she said that prior research suggests that’s not the case. In addition, depression causing online time doesn’t explain why depression increased so suddenly after 2012,” Twenge noted. Under that scenario, more teens became depressed for an unknown reason and then started buying smartphones — an idea that defies logic. That said, teens who spend less than two hours a day online do not appear to face any elevated mental health risks, suggesting there might be a practical sweet spot for device use short of total abstinence.